Every year Toby and I get ideas for Halloween costumes and spend weeks digging deep into the internets to find details on them so we can create it all from scratch. I’m not sure why we like doing this so much, but we just do. People seem to enjoy what we come up with so I guess everyone wins

Last year I went as Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction, post adrenaline shot. I figured I’d give a step by step of what I did for others looking to make this sort of thing. Unfortunately, when you Google Mia Wallace Costume, a lot of inaccurate stuff pops up.

First I started by purchasing a men’s white dress shirt and I tailored it to look like the one she’s wearing. The bottom of it points down in the front and the cuffs are large. I had to bring the whole thing in on the sides, arms and back to make it fit properly. I hate sewing so this was the most annoying part. Next I found some black pants with a slight flare and hemmed them so they were a little short on me. The pic below is the shirt and pants all finished (without all the blood and whatnot). I had also found the wig at this point. This is before I styled the wig. I had to really mess that wig up, but I’ll get to that later.

Next is that bustier top that she’s got under the shirt. I found something in the same shape and then covered it with similar fabric that I miraculously found at Joann’s.

So at this point I had to figure out how to realistically mount the syringe to my chest. In the film it appears that Uma Thurman is wearing an entire chest plate. You can see it wiggle when she sits up, and she’s definitely trying to hide seams around her neck with her chin and hands. What I decided to do was to attach some bailing wire to the center of my bra (which I wore under the bustier) and run it up against my skin to the point at which the needle hits, and then make a 90 degree angle out from my chest. Then I took some very thin netting, used for making wigs (lace), and glued it over the part of the wire that ran against my skin with some Pros Aide. Next I covered it with wax and then a little liquid latex, painted it up with flesh tones and it was hidden. Don’t forget the red dot that Vincent draws on her!

Before I built this rig, I created the syringe. A real syringe just wasn’t going to do because it’s way too heavy to be held up by anything. So I made a light weight syringe from scratch out of some mylar and foam pieces. You can get thin squishy foam sheets from Michaels, which is what I used to make the plunger. The actual tip of the syringe is from a real syringe. I just sawed that part off, and because it was so light weight it was perfect to mount my fake syringe to and still function as a syringe tip. So basically then I just stuck that syringe right onto the wire sticking out of my chest and voila, it looks like the needle is coming right out of your skin.

So there it is. And it was rock solid – didn’t break all night, even when people tried to grab it. Of course me angrily yelling BACK OFF! helped as well.

Up next was the wig, which needed to be styled. I got it from an awesome place called Hollywood Wigs on Hollywood Blvd. They style wigs for you but I wanted to do it myself. This took some doing. I had to take chunks and burn them with curling iron to lose the sleek look. I had to tease, hairspray, glue, grease, trim, yank, etc. to get this thing right. The result was super close to Mia’s hair and I was satisfied.

In the end I made myself look very pale, and added some dark circles under my eyes. Then I added the blood. Blood on the face coming out of the nose, thick blood all over my hands and shirt. I sprayed the shirt with water when the blood was on it so it saturated the shirt and made it pink. She’s sweating profusely as she’s ODing and she pukes all over herself, so the shirt should be FILTHY.

She’s barefoot when she gets the shot, but I just wore some gold flip flops. I also put a wedding ring on. (MRS. Mia Wallace).

I posted this side by side comparison photo on Reddit and it soared to #1 within hours, which was super exciting. Within a couple days it had around 800,000 hits and was popping up all over the internet other sites like Break.com. Here’s the reddit link.

So that’s it. I know it seems like a lot of effort for a Halloween costume but when you’re walking around at a party or you’re on Santa Monica Blvd at the LA Halloween Parade and tons of people are stopping you to take pictures with you, or thousands of people are looking at your work on line and critiquing it, it’s a pretty cool feeling, and makes all of the effort worth it. In addition to this costume, I helped Toby with his Doc Brown costume, which I’ll post about later.

Hi! Sorry for the delayed response. I actually made the syringe out of mylar so that it would be super light weight – that’s the key to the whole thing – any weight makes it impossible for it to hold up.